


Solving for N

by Match (pachipachi)



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Torture, Imprisonment, It's Not Gratuitous If It's Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-27
Updated: 2017-03-27
Packaged: 2018-10-11 10:15:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10462545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pachipachi/pseuds/Match
Summary: Avon's five days.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This began as a remix of Executrix's [Anonymous](http://archiveofourown.org/works/219631), but by the end of the first round of edits Avon was no longer an alcoholic. Would that recovery were so easy for all of us.
> 
> Beta by aralias, who understood what the story was supposed to be about before I did, and whose perceptive editing improved my work by orders of magnitude.

All prisons were the same prison in the end, down to the cold greasy texture of prefab bunks and papery quality of the air. It was Avon who'd changed.

*

The first set of interrogators was long on theatrics and short on muscle. He'd once known a domme who'd charged more per hour than these fellows made in a week. She could have taught them a thing or two. Stand straight when telling the prisoner to get on his feet. I know you've got your patter memorized, you ought to be able to blat it out sans gulps or _hrrmm_ s or _now see here_ s.

Of course the light never changed, but the ventilation ducts gave a particular rattle just before the air cycle switched on. Avon counted through two cycles: regular enough. Between that and one's heartbeat it ought to be possible to estimate hours elapsed since the onset of confinement. Should be, that is. Stress elevated the heart rate, cold and fatigue depressed it, sleep or fainting would force a reset of the count, and the bastards never gave him enough time between rounds to so much as establish basic parameters for a thought experiment. It was enough to make one sympathize with Orac.

The interrogators, on leaving, tossed him a squishy packet of something that gestured towards food but wasn't quite. It might have been drugged, but then so might the air. He ate.

*

It was towards the end of the third round of interrogation that Cally's nerve-blocking compound began to wear off. Not having to keep his limbs in line of sight in order to move them was a petty luxury against having to feel what they felt.

Fourth round, second set of interrogators. It proved more difficult than he'd anticipated to keep track of which lies were false confession, which feigned concealment, and which weren't lies at all. At least his cries were real, now.

*

"I have made my best approximation of the dosage," she'd said, "but you do understand the drug was never intended for this mode of use."

"Thank you, Cally. You've completed your due diligence. Now get on with it."

She looked up from preparing the syringe as if she'd been interrupted at field-stripping a complicated sort of laser rifle. "I mean that even with everything I've added to extend the half-life, it will act at full strength for at most thirty hours. By fifty hours it will have metabolized completely."

"I've been on my own before."

"But you're not on your own now, are you? Arm, please."

A jab. Or perhaps she'd meant it to comfort him? He'd always found Cally difficult to read.

*

All sorts of noises echoed through the ductwork. Cries, indistinct monotone recitation, threats made good. Interludes of weeping. Something that could have been an asthma attack drowned out by a high-powered vacuum cleaner. One might attribute the lack of soundproofing to shoddy work by a low-bid contractor, but Avon knew well that Federation did nothing by accident. He heard what he was meant to hear: as they are, so shall you be.

Footsteps in the corridor never seemed to match the number who entered. Twice Avon heard them wrangling a noisy wheeled contraption that did not initially appear. A few rounds later they presented it diffidently, with no telltale clanking from the corridor.

To look at it might have been an ordinary temp-control cabinet holding medical supplies, say, or hot meals for shut-ins. It wasn't. 

Counting drawers and tiny cupboards as they were revealed was too boring to serve as a focal point, also he kept losing track. Either the fifty-hour mark had gone or Cally hadn't given him enough. Avon thought about the subroutines controlling each of the cabinet's various armatures until he couldn't think any longer.

They, and the machine, left shortly afterwards. Must have been something he'd said.

*

Had Blake been tortured? He'd never spoken of it. Surely of all his memories those would be ones the Federation would have him keep.

Unless they were playing the long game. Unless Blake's immediate pain were ancillary to their purposes, simply the readiest means of inoculating him against the possibility of escaping their control. Absent memory, absent scars, Blake might realize how he had been violated only in retrospect. Only as, blundering on, he sprang the mental traps they'd set for him. Each trigger revealed and quelled would bear warning of another, deeper trauma. Why cripple him physically when you could paralyze him with doubt? Though Blake ran, sooner than later he’d come to understand that his mind was no longer his own. 

*

"Does your neck itch?" Cally had asked.

"If I were still conscious of having a neck I might be able to tell you."

She set to clearing up, lips pursed. "The drug is taking effect more quickly than I’d anticipated. By the time I set you down you may not have enough coordination left to smash your teleport bracelet."

"Are you offering to come with me?" Avon, if pressed, would have been forced to admit it wasn't a rhetorical question.

"Orac can operate the teleport. I’d think it would be a comfort to have a friend with you a little while longer. You’ll be alone for a long time down there." Having disposed of sharps and gauze, put away the remainder of the compound, and sanitized the counter, Cally had moved on to tidying things no one had touched in months.

"I'm more concerned about the parts where I'm not alone," Avon shot back. "Do you really think it would give me any comfort to have you lurking round the corner, watching out for them to take me?" Consonants were becoming more difficult. "You getting captured would completely upset the plan."

"Yes," she replied tartly, "and also I'd be captured."

Avon had always been able to deliver an apology with his face alone, but the fine muscles had gone. He gave Cally a single slow blink and hoped she understood.

*

It wasn’t until Avon heard a certain falling intonation for the second time that he knew.: there were no other prisoners. Or rather, these weren’t them. The Federation, after all, did nothing by accident. Was it a single recording for general consumption, he wondered without curiosity, or did each prisoner hear a different slate of misery?

Inspecting the cell for a hidden loudspeaker would gain him nothing. Besides, he stood an equal chance of finding an audio pickup.

There was a lacuna in Avon’s memory the exact size and shape of the corridor outside his cell. Had he _actually_ seen its door from the outside, or was he borrowing that memory from another cell, in another life? 

There had been Cally at the controls, that was certain. Avon remembered blinking through the teleport haze to hold her form in focus to the last possible moment. Then the dingy arcades of what might have been a fashionable neighborhood years ago, around the first time Avon was arrested. For all he knew it might have been the same neighborhood.

They’d picked him up casually, one plainclothesman hailing him as a friend, the other ready behind him with a covert sidearm to the ribs as Avon tried to shrink away. And Avon made a pliant victim; would have even if he hadn’t been still woozy from concussion. Hope of escape had died with Anna. In truth, hadn’t he been waiting to be caught from the moment he walked out of the dealer’s rooms, blood in his mouth and visas in hand? His capture had been choreographed to the Nth degree. Avon was the only one who didn’t know his part.

There had been the same coverall then, laying on the same bunk. The guards had waited for his clothes down to the undergarments. Like a fool, he’d taken care to hand over a neatly folded bundle. If they’d spoken more than two words together he didn’t remember it. The last thing he saw before the door slid to was a stray reflection of ceiling caught in a cyclops-eye. In the moment that the locks caught Avon knew himself as alone as a man might ever be.

Having done it once, the event was simple enough to recreate. Avon saw himself in memory as if on a surveillance feed: approaching the same corner again and again, overshooting, doubling back. Loitering ostentatiously with nothing in his pockets like the galaxy’s saddest, shabbiest rentboy.

He should have accepted Cally’s offer. Absent witnesses, it could be terribly difficult to establish that an event had taken place at all. Avon sensed but could not prove that there had been a time when his mind had not been entirely his own, a space his body had moved through unaware. In fact he had no empirical evidence of his capture beyond the obvious fact of confinement. And if the cries he heard were prerecorded, what evidence did he have that there were any other cells at all? Avon could remember which headlines had been scrolling at the news kiosk where the plainclothesmen had caught up with him four years ago. He couldn’t picture the facade of the building they held him in now. It could well be they’d trapped him in a simulacrum of what he’d expected to find, prisons within prisons within prisons. The implant shrank to nothing, Cally and the others disappeared, even Anna’s face blurred in his mind’s eye.

But of course his captors would be too pleased if Avon were to lapse into paranoid solipsism. Better to trust that he was one of many dozing on the same bunks, under the same light, wrapped in the same noise. Ambient music for sadists. The soundtrack of the damned.

Given the sheer number of voiceprints they had to call on, it seemed implausible that any single clip might repeat. Or perhaps they did and he'd only noticed this one. It wasn't the timbre of the voice but something in its cadence that reminded Avon of an pop song, one that had been everywhere in the Domes around the time he’d met Anna. He still remembered most of the words.

Avon also thought he heard once, on the muzzy edge of waking, a voice that sounded not unlike Anna's. As if she were crying out to him. As if she had never ceased doing. It was statistically improbable the voice might have been hers, but wasn't it somehow correct to find her in the depths? Here the barest reminder of her was a touchstone, a spur.

*

The area round the implant remained numb well after Cally's drug had worn off. There was a small twinge when he shifted his jaw to the right: something dark and oily, not quite pain. He wanted to imagine he might pick up an echo of the transmitter beacon if he clenched his teeth at the correct angle. Would it be a pulse, a hum, a vibration? Of course he felt nothing. Avon sucked on his teeth and believed all the harder.

Of all the criminals and unfortunates Avon had known, he himself was the only one to walk into prison eyes open. Not even Blake had been so daft. Still there was no question Blake had seen more, endured more. Avon might repudiate Blake all he liked, but here there was no bright line between them. Being a political prisoner was categorically different from enduring prison for love, but what did that matter to the walls? As far as the guards were concerned, he might have been picked up for yelling naked in the street while blackout drunk. 

Better even that than to be mistaken for another reckless fool performing the Stations of the Cross for living martyr Roj Blake. Blake would allow love by negotiated contract and revenge pending committee review. Not even one's suffering might be private.

*

Avon knew he must have slept but couldn't remember having done. There were times when he felt less cold, that was all; times when the soundtrack of the damned receded. Nothing so merciful as a blackout.

*

After a decent interval the first set of interrogators reappeared, giving no sign they recognized him. In the moment it seemed not just plausible but inevitable that he and they were to start over from the beginning.

"Now see here," one guard would begin, ostentatiously raising his eyebrows.

And the other would chime in: "...you're in a heap of trouble, aren't you, man..."

The first again: "...course there's a way through, but it's our way. Don't think you'll like it."

Later Avon would recognize this as the beginning of the end.

*

It was clear the guards cared less about his answers than the means used to extract them. Around this time they lost interest in even the questions. Each round drew closer to the Platonic ideal of a hostile interrogation: every statement correct in form, devoid of content.

Perhaps his case had been co-opted for a training exercise. That would certainly explain the escalating number of guards who shuffled through, and their de-escalating level of competence.

Respite, when it came, was actually worse. Avon waited out a full cycle of the ventilation system and counted another hour against his heartbeat. Panopticon, hell-- the ideal prison might be any room so long as it orchestrated a perfectly anhedonic environment. Try to recall a pleasant time with friends and the mind's eye returns a series of unflattering photographs. Every smile a grimace, every kind word curdled.

*

A single set of footsteps in the corridor. The door visored open: one figure in his peripheral vision. If prisons had office parties this would be the man called upon to dress up as the Yule-Father come Solstice season. He was empty-handed, but the implements might be very small and a standard uniform had pockets for days.

It was no trouble at all for Avon to lever himself upright; easy as lying curled and hidden. Any pain, if there was pain, was manageable. 

That Avon would lie to himself as readily as to an interrogator was perhaps not a positive sign. 

"Did I bleed on the wrong bit of floor?" 

The correct patter came automatically. The bleeding was a figure of speech, of course. Actual blood would have been a mercy. The taste and smell of it was something to bite down on, something to remind yourself all this was real and so were you. 

Don't look, his mind shrilled as the Yule-Father approached. Don't not look, it could be, it couldn't, no other, who else would have the arrogance to come alone? Shrinker.

He'd spoken the name aloud no more than half a dozen times. Now he said it again and the man before him swelled. "You've heard of me?"

Avon had cross-tabbed dates and locations and service records till he could recite ID numbers and site codes from memory. The few interrogation logs Orac could access were text-only, fragmentary. He'd studied them. Had dreamed of Shrinker: huger than life, standing over his bed fingering a garrotte or a chloroform sponge, Avon wrenching himself awake at the last possible moment. 

Rumor brought the name. Orac provided the face. He'd endured that he might know the voice. Every report, every transcript now sprang to life in Shrinker's timbre, the only voice he could have possibly imagined.

Avon said: "I knew you would show up eventually." He had to play dumb only a few moments longer. And there it was:

“Don’t worry,” Shrinker said genially, “it’s sending all right.”

Time. Avon shifted his jaw once more to catch that particular twinge. As Cally had keyed it to his body, as she'd rehearsed with him: three fingers down from the temporal bone, press once and click your teeth. You won't be able to feel it, in the moment. Trust.

"Your friends aren't coming," Shrinker was saying. Avon felt a warm flash of dread; hated himself for feeling it. That he might cower even through total certainty of what he'd triggered was a backhanded compliment to Shrinker's skill.

"Is there anyone," and there was a richness in the torturer’s voice, a musing contempt, "...anyone who thinks you're worth dying for?"

"Not anymore --" but did Blake count? The man went around offering to die for any and every, he'd make even Avon stand in line. Cally, too, had her eyes fixed on the horizon of the possible, with scarcely a thought for who might stand beside her. "Not since Anna," Avon said, like a catechism. Did it matter that she'd never said the words, not in all the promises they'd made each other? Anna, no longer available for comment, could not contradict him.

Shrinker looming now, the laser probe close enough to brush his eyelashes, "...and you'll begin by telling me your name."

If they were recording, and why wouldn't they be, this would be something to save for the highlights reel. Shallow breath, voice tinged with the despair of abandonment or failure or both, eyes fixed on nothing, and nothing feigned, not now. As they were, so shall you be. There was no equivocation left in him and nothing true but his name. He said it.

"Avon!" 

_I believe, absent contrary evidence, that my name is Avon. I believe I am the identical Avon to the one who entered this complex five, apparently five days ago. I believe that this Avon carries a foreign implant keyed to a certain use. I believe there are actions which have been planned. Which will be taken._

"My friends won't come while it's sending. But now --" there was a faint reverb effect, as if the room had expanded, or Avon had -- "I've switched it off."

Each set of joints stacked on the next like an industrial robot clanking into position. He fixed his eyes on the middle distance and let the teleport's corona blind him. Others might fast and pray for a vision of string theory or music of the spheres. All Avon had to do was wait and allow the harmonics to converge upon him.

Tarrant's "...here!" might have arrived before his body. Avon couldn't swear to it either way. And there was Dayna: "... _very_ still!" He could have kissed them. Could have kissed even Tarrant and not thought it a hardship. Anything to draw out the last shipboard breaths from their bodies.

"You're Blake's people!"

The name aloud stung more than it ought, however gratifying Shrinker's look of shock. Two years gone and what was he but Blake's man, still? "You're right,” he said.

Bits of the room were coming at him in flashes. An aborted cry that might have been more of the soundtrack of the damned, might have been his own. Shrinker's eyes darting from one body and one weapon to another. A particular set to Dayna's jaw.

Avon's "No!" broke from his lips before he'd known he meant to speak. He's mine. As he claimed Anna, as he would have claimed me. As they would yet claim Blake. The blow was an afterthought. That Shrinker did fall was more from astonishment, surely, than force of impact.

And the white haze of the teleport took them. Avon locked his knees until the effect cleared. It sometimes made him wobbly, and he was through with stumbling for a long time. Vila at the ready with liquid comfort. One of Cally's draughts, by the smell. She behind the teleport controls wearing the same tunic as when she'd set him down. Everything was terribly large and terribly small at the same time, the room curving round itself, collapsing into her careful gaze. He drank.

Avon slotted his bracelet alongside the rest. He found himself gazing into the black mirror of a gunmetal divot, feet curling and flexing as warmth opened the fine muscles. How had he overlooked that the ship's decking had radiant heat?

But when was the last time he'd gone barefoot?

The light was no less artificial, but here his skin had shed its grayish cast. This batch of recycled air smelled correct; smelled of nothing. This was home, then. And he could never, would never know if it were that Blake had made Liberator theirs, or that Avon, in spite of him, had made the ship his own.


End file.
